And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the onetime Republican back-bencher from Georgia who is eyeing Obama's job, said on NBC's "Today Show" that the president's openness to talking to anti-American leaders like Chavez speaks to "a shallowness about how they analyze things."

For his part, Obama has defended his outreach-to-enemies approach to foreign policy, something he promised during the campaign. Before leaving the summit Sunday, he responded to the uproar over the Chavez photo, saying, "It's unlikely as a consequence of my shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the national security interests of the United States."

But the truly amazing thing is that the book, written in 1971, is also increasing in cost. Yep, Chavez and Ortega, those bad-boy Marxists of Latin America, have provoked a good old-fashioned, capitalistic, supply-and-demand price war.